Privacy Preserving Analytics on Distributed Medical Data
This enables healthcare organizations to combine distributed data for predictive modeling without compromising privacy, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing privacy-preserving techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of building machine learning models from distributed medical data while preserving privacy, proposing a method that works without altering input data and is resilient as long as most sites don't collude.
Objective: To enable privacy-preserving learning of high quality generative and discriminative machine learning models from distributed electronic health records. Methods and Results: We describe general and scalable strategy to build machine learning models in a provably privacy-preserving way. Compared to the standard approaches using, e.g., differential privacy, our method does not require alteration of the input biomedical data, works with completely or partially distributed datasets, and is resilient as long as the majority of the sites participating in data processing are trusted to not collude. We show how the proposed strategy can be applied on distributed medical records to solve the variables assignment problem, the key task in exact feature selection and Bayesian networks learning. Conclusions: Our proposed architecture can be used by health care organizations, spanning providers, insurers, researchers and computational service providers, to build robust and high quality predictive models in cases where distributed data has to be combined without being disclosed, altered or otherwise compromised.